Lost generation betrayed by Obama

It used to be that a college degree was a ticket to a pretty good job. No more. College graduates are now called the “Lost” generation because more than half of recent graduates are jobless or working only non-career part-time jobs or working jobs that don’t require a college degree.

Today’s college students have been betrayed by the Obama administration in so many ways. It was just the start when government invited them to mortgage their futures by taking out big loans to pay extravagant tuition prices and then they discover they can’t get a job worth the price of the loans.

Government loans even encourage students to borrow money to spend five or six years in college because, unprepared for college-level studies, they must take remedial courses to learn what they should have been taught in high school. Student loans now total $1 trillion, and the average student owes $25,000.

The government reports that the unemployment rate for Americans under age 25 was 15.6 percent in August, which is more than 2.5 times the rate for those over age 25. The real figure is over 20 percent if we count the thousands of jobless who are not in official figures because they conceal their unemployment by taking more worthless college courses or are just not looking for a job.

The failure to get a job that justifies their college debt means their lives are on hold. The entire generation is postponing moving out of their parents’ homes, getting married and having children and are even having a hard time buying a car.

As Northeastern University economist Andrew Sum pointed out, it’s not just the kids who lose. It’s all of us because “they don’t pay taxes, they stay at home, they don’t get married.”

Job prospects are just as gloomy for STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) graduates as those in less rigorous subjects. Obama’s betrayal of STEM graduates is even buried in (surprise, surprise) Obamacare, where the good entry-level jobs are given to foreigners on H-1B visas instead of qualified Americans.

While most media coverage about Obamacare has been about the exchanges, billions of dollars of contracts concern the implementation of Obamacare. Federal tax dollars pay up to 90 percent of the cost to upgrade state Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS), and health care has become a very important market for outsourcing.

The District of Columbia awarded Infosys a $49.5 million contract to develop a health benefit exchange and replace its Medicaid and eligibility systems, paying foreign technology analysts $63,631 per year, project managers $107,738 and technology architects $130,147.

Gov. Patrick Quinn of Illinois granted one of the largest contracts to Cognizant Technology Solutions to outsource jobs to contractors from India. This contract awards a $71.4 million contract that will pay up to $256,160 per year per position.

This contract is to upgrade Illinois’ Medicaid systems to meet Obamacare requirements. Cognizant filed paperwork with the U.S. Department of Labor to hire 60 foreign systems analysts on H-1B visas to work on this project at the pay rate of $76,814.

Based in Teaneck, N.J., Cognizant is one of the top seven corporations using H-1B visas. It got 9,999 approved last year for foreigners to work in the United States, even though the major part of Cognizant’s work is done overseas.

Cognizant is busily recruiting consultants, coders, architects, MBAs and programmers with skills such as “working knowledge of Medicaid and MMIS.” Job openings are listed for medical billing specialists and system programmers with knowledge of Medicaid and HIPAA laws. Cognizant’s consulting fees of up to $256,160 per person per year will replace senior state managers making $150,000 per year.

As soon as the ink was dry on the Illinois contract, Cognizant applied for more than 100 H-1B visas from India for the work. The agreement lets Cognizant charge an additional $200,000 taxpayer-financed slush fund for first-year travel costs. After all, it’s expensive for the new hires to travel from India to Springfield, Ill.

Cognizant’s outsourcing business model isn’t any secret. The company’s SEC filings state: “The vast majority of our technical professionals in the United States and Europe are Indian nationals.”

We are indebted to Illinois activist Adam Andrzejewski for reading the relevant documents and reporting this important news that major media overlooked. He started a website called OpenTheBooks.com, which is based on the novel theory that the public is entitled to know how our tax dollars are spent.

There are many good reasons for Congress to defund Obamacare, but surely one is the sneaky, secret, underhanded plan to give well-paid Obamacare jobs to foreigners instead of to our own college graduates who need them. Rank this as another of Obama’s gross betrayals of the young people who voted for him.